“There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.”

“I've never met anyone who wanted to be a terrorist. They are desperate people.”

“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe… Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.”

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”

“Eloquence consists of persuading people of things they desperately want to believe. Demagoguery, I suppose, is eloquence sliding to some least moral energy level.”

“People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world.”

“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”

“People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.”

“I was wondering what made a decent English army officer turn into a desperate revolutionist overnight,” I smiled.
“It happens to many like that,” he said. “I have seen them. But you have to show them so much injustice first… Nobody wants to believe that the world is cruel—or that one’s own kind are cruel. Not to know cruelty is to remain innocent, eh? And we should all like to remain innocent. A revolutionist is a man who, perhaps, fails to keep his innocence but so desperately wants it back that he seeks to create a world where all shall be innocent in that way.”